Great Expectations: The Role of Rules in Guiding Pro-social Behaviour in Groups with High Versus Low Autistic Traits

You are sitting in a crowded waiting room with a small bag, waiting for a delayed train. All the other seats are taken by passengers with lots of luggage. A woman enters the waiting room looking for a seat.

Means and standard deviations (SD) for each of the measures are presented below in Table 2. A significance level of .05 was adopted, with adjustment for post hoc t tests (.05/2) to control for multiple comparisons.

Since both emotional and cognitive components of empathy are thought to play a role in motivating pro-social behaviour (Eisenberg 2007), this theoretical account could explain the decreased pro-social behaviour displayed by the high AQ group. With regard to ASD, although it has been posited that this is associated with impaired mentalising but intact emotional empathy (Blair 2008), there is some conflict in the literature exploring this. Some studies examining the recognition of, and response to, affective expressions have reported impairment in ASD (Humphreys et al. 2007) and others have not (Adolphs et al. 2001). This inconsistent picture may reflect the differing intellectual capabilities of individuals with ASD and/or a variety of task demands (Blair 2008).

It has also been suggested that those with ASD may possess limited capacity to resonate emotionally with others via a self-focused stance, mediated by a heightened sense of egocentricity, at the expense of the ability to take an allocentric (other-focused) stance (Frith and de Vignemont 2005; Minio-Paluello et al. 2009). With respect to the present AQ study, it is possible that an imbalance in the priorities placed on self versus other needs resulted in less motivation to behave pro-socially, regardless of whether the high AQ group could correctly identify and understand the characters’ needs. The high AQ participants may therefore have focused on themselves and prioritised their own interests at the expense of helping others, and experiencing reduced resonance with the characters’ points of view may have compounded this.

However, impairment in emotional empathy could not account for the greater tendency of the high AQ group to use rule-based rationales in the clear-cut condition when reasoning about why one should behave pro-socially, nor the differences observed in the speed of rationale production. Impairment in emotional empathy in the context of intact mentalising abilities would not be expected to affect the high AQ group’s capacity to understand how they should behave and why; rather, it should selectively influence their actual behaviour. Nonetheless, a possible contribution of emotional empathy cannot be dismissed, since it is difficult to disentangle the relative contributions of this versus mentalising in relation to measures designed to explore everyday social behaviour.

A mentalising explanation would contend that other-oriented pro-social behaviour is dependent upon appreciating others’ perspectives, and acting accordingly; failure to do so may have reduced the participants’ incentive to help the characters, resulting in reduced compliance with the societal expectation to behave pro-socially. This explanation is consistent with some evidence in studies of those with high autistic traits suggesting differences on tasks tapping mentalising including social attention (Freeth et al. 2013) and poorer performance on false belief tasks (Best et al. 2008).

The sympathy ratings may provide the most direct measure of mentalising. Sympathy refers to feelings of concern about the welfare of others, and is thought to play a motivating role in pro-social behaviour via other-oriented processes (Decety and Michalska 2010). Whilst sympathy and empathy are often conflated, they are in fact distinct concepts; the experience of sympathy is said to be dependent upon the mentalistic ability to apprehend another’s mental state, but it does not necessarily require a vicarious emotional experience (Decety and Chaminade 2003). On this basis, sympathising with characters in the social expectations task requires participants to put themselves in others’ shoes and imagine how they would feel in such a situation, and is potentially mediated by mentalising abilities. Lower sympathy ratings by the high AQ group are therefore consistent with the evidence of impaired mentalising in those with ASD.

Some previous work has reported ‘black and white’ sympathy ratings in those with ASD, with heightened sensitivity to ‘good’ versus ‘poor’ justifications for wrongdoing (Channon et al. 2010), and greater differentiation between intentional and unintentional actions when assigning blame (Channon et al. 2011). No evidence of such ‘black and white’ thinking was found in the present AQ study, since sympathy ratings were lower overall in the high versus low AQ group, and the groups were not differentially affected by the strength of the social rule. However, the nature of the present study is different to those previously used, since in the Channon et al. tasks, lack of sympathy in the group with ASD related to characters acting for reasons that generally contravene societal, and indeed legal, expectations (e.g. drunk driving after a party, or intentionally giving a spouse an overdose of their medication). By contrast, in the present AQ study, the characters were all deserving of help and thus sympathy, regardless of the condition.

One potential caveat for an interpretation consistent with a mentalising deficit is that those with high AQ traits did not differ from the low trait group on some measures assessing participants’ understanding of characters’ expectations for help. At first glance it might appear that a mentalistic appraisal is required to grasp the characters’ expectations. However, routes other than mentalising may also lead to similar judgments of the characters’ expectations, such as reliance on knowledge of societal norms. More broadly, it has been suggested that individuals with ASD may not rely on intuitive socio-emotional processes for solving social and moral dilemmas (Greene and Haidt 2002). Rather, it may be a more laborious process in which individuals with ASD learn about and apply social rules, especially when these are readily available.

Thus, in the clear-cut task condition of the current study where the social rules were more salient, the high AQ group appeared to draw upon these rules by providing more rule-based and fewer person-based justifications for the reasons surrounding why one should act pro-socially. On the other hand, when salient rules were not available in the ambiguous condition, the high AQ group was able to produce person-based rationales as often as the low AQ group. This may indicate a stylistic preference for rule-based reasoning over reliance on mentalistic processes, which may be more effortful for them. This interpretation is also supported by the finding that those with high AQ traits tended to be slower to produce rationales only in the ambiguous condition. A lack of salient social rules underpinning the scenarios may have forced them to exert more effort and employ person-based rationale, making heavier demands on mentalising ability.

This is also consistent with previous literature indicating that individuals with ASD might provide correct answers, but that the reasoning behind their judgments is often more limited (Moran et al. 2011). For instance, children with ASD have been found to show accurate moral judgements (Grant et al. 2005; Leslie et al. 2006), and intact understanding of transgressions involving breaking social versus moral rules (Blair 1996), but to display difficulties in justifying their choices. Zalla et al. (2009) similarly found that adults with ASD were able to use compensatory strategies to carry out social judgments regarding faux-pax, but failed to justify their responses adequately.

Interpreting the findings of the present AQ study in the light of previous relevant work in ASD, it appears that individuals with high numbers of autistic traits may show some preservation of social judgement and assimilate the characters’ expectations (a mentalistic demand), by seemingly exploiting their knowledge of rules regarding societal norms. Further evidence supporting the use of compensatory mechanisms within the autistic spectrum can be derived from a recent neuroimaging study that asked why some children with ASD pass classic mentalising tasks, and others do not (White et al. 2014). They subdivided ASD participants into groups who either failed or passed such tasks, and compared their brain activation patterns with those of typically developing children during an online mentalising task. Regardless of whether they belonged to the ‘fail’ or ‘pass’ groups, participants with ASD showed differences in brain regions associated with mentalising in comparison to typically developing children. This suggests that even individuals with ASD who pass such tasks may be doing so via an alternative route.

In the present AQ study, reliance on compensatory mechanisms such as social knowledge may have circumvented the need to employ mentalistic processes when estimating the characters’ expectations. However, this may be at the expense of resonating with someone emotionally, and hence this may explain why the high AQ group reported less sympathy with the characters, and were less likely to help them. Both mentalisitic abilities and emotional empathy play a key role in facilitating socially sensitive behaviour, and it is likely that healthy individuals use both social knowledge stores and socio-emotional processes to assess social scenarios and respond appropriately. In order to make good use of social rules to deal with complex social stimuli in a range of contexts, flexibility is required to learn about the contingencies for applying rules appropriately to different conditions (Nelson and Guyer 2011; Bunge 2004). This is likely to draw upon executive skills, which are thought to be impaired in individuals diagnosed with ASD (see Hill 2004 for a review). From a developmental perspective, as children become adolescents, and in turn adults, the complexity of the social environments they navigate increases dramatically. In typically developing children, this should be supported by gradually enhanced social knowledge, as a result of exposure to more challenging and ambiguous social environments. However, in children and adolescents with ASD, who tend to avoid social engagement (Richer 1976), and/or experience the social world in an ‘atypical’ fashion (Hughes and Leekam 2004), such learning may be deficient. Thus, the acquisition of social rule knowledge and its use may be further protracted or stunted in those with ASD. With respect to the current study, this could account for the high AQ group’s failure to put their relatively preserved knowledge of social rules into practice by choosing to help the characters.

The present study examined individuals drawn from the general population with high AQ traits and did not require a clinical diagnosis of ASD. One might expect those with high AQ traits to show a muted, albeit similar, pattern of social performance to those with a clinical diagnosis of ASD. Although there is no evidence of a bimodal distribution separating out clinical and non-clinical levels of impairments (Skuse et al. 2005), a clear dose–response relationship for degree of autistic traits has yet to be established. Whilst the pattern of findings from the present study is broadly consistent with literature examining social functioning in individuals diagnosed with ASD versus neurotypical controls, it would nevertheless be important to extend these measures to a clinical sample before clinical applications could be developed from these findings. This could also help to establish the validity of the assumption that there is a continuum of social ability relating to the number and severity of autistic traits, regardless of a clinical threshold.

Social difficulties such as problems in forming or maintaining interpersonal relationships or engaging in inappropriate behaviour are often central to the everyday struggles that individuals with ASD face (Troisi 2008; Crespi and Badcock 2008). In order to design effective interventions, such as social skill training, it is important to have a detailed understanding of how individuals’ symptoms may interact with the environment and disrupt everyday functioning. At present, this level of understanding is very limited, with most work focusing on either abstract laboratory based tasks or clinical reports. Tasks such as the current one provide a rich source of material for understanding of the nature of everyday difficulties that those with high AQ traits, or possibly a diagnosis of ASD, may face. It could potentially be used in clinical settings to identify factors that may facilitate or impinge upon successful everyday social functioning, and to better inform interventions (Channon et al. 2014). The findings of the present study with respect to reduced pro-social behaviour in those with high AQ traits, highlight the need for social skills training to embrace both expanding individuals’ knowledge of social rules (e.g. you should give up your seat to someone elderly), and to target the flexible application of social rules to novel situations. In individuals diagnosed with ASD an overreliance on social rules, without a deeper understanding of the social implications or caveats, may lead to awkward and inflexible patterns of social behaviour. Compensatory cognitive strategies can be useful in the face of reduced or absent capacity to access appropriate socio-emotional processing. However, they must be combined with enhanced social motivation; otherwise, individuals may be aware of the rules, but fail to act on them, as appears to have been the case in the present study. Social motivation is an area of research that has been neglected in ASD, and which requires further exploration. For instance, it would be interesting to study how rewards are processed by individuals with high AQ traits or ASD, and which kind of rewards might facilitate appropriate behaviour.

A potential limitation of the study concerns the validity and sensitivity of measures such as the Social Expectations task that attempt to tap everyday social behaviour. The strength of tasks such as this is that they use real-life-type materials to investigate performance. Real-life-type materials have advantages over more traditional abstract laboratory tasks, since they are more likely to draw upon both social and practical knowledge acquired both directly and indirectly through life experience, in addition to intellectual skills. Despite these advantages, however, any task that is carried out under experimental conditions with structured cues that constrain and prompt performance in a manner that can be easily measured and interpreted, has limitations with respect to real world validity. Such cues are often lacking in everyday life and their presence in experimental tests may thus lead to a lack of correspondence with real world performance and an underestimation of social difficulties outside of the laboratory (Channon et al. 2001). This is particularly pertinent when assessing individuals who share characteristics of ASD, where high-functioning individuals have been found to pass traditional mentalising tasks but to show difficulties with more open-ended and naturalistic measures (Heavey et al. 2000). It is therefore important to try to replicate these findings in more naturalistic environments, which can often be much more stimulating and interpersonally demanding. One way forward may be through the use of virtual reality paradigms.